As a business, invoices are a fundamental part of record keeping, accounting and ensuring you receive payment for services rendered. With most consultants, the time consuming yet complicated steps to creating one from scratch is often discouraging and feels overwhelming.
Luckily, our invoicing feature takes away this challenge, giving you an easy-to-use tool to create professional invoices for clients that capture relevant details of service rendered, factoring payable taxes and to ensure timely payments are made by clients on agreed terms. In this guide, we’ll show you steps to get you started.
Get Started
On your Oddience account, tap the navigation bar on the top left corner and click on ‘Invoices’ to begin. This takes you to the overview page of all invoices – paid, pending and overdue, created with your account within a timeframe.
Invoice page.
For new invoices, click on the ‘Create Invoice’ icon to enter all relevant information under these categories:
Add Your Company Details:
Here your company information is required to ensure the client is able to recognize your business and confirm the billing request. Your company name, address and logo are updated to the cells provided.
Your company details required to create an invoice.
Add Client Details:
Add a new or existing client to send the invoice to. To add a new client, fill out their contact details such as email, name, phone number and company name (optional).
Adding a new client for invoicing.
Add Service Details:
Describe details of the service rendered by including the title, description, quantity purchased and amount per unit.
Add Payment Instructions:
Set terms to ensure the client understands the payment obligations. You may include a percentage VAT, set agreed upfront payment and due date for this invoice.
Add Additional Details:
As a consultant, your services are usually grouped into projects and so including the project name helps your client know what exactly they are getting billed for. Add the ‘Project Name’ and ‘Commissions’, where applicable, to the ‘Additional Details’ section.
Preview Invoice Once Confirmed
Before sending an invoice, you can preview by clicking the ‘Preview Invoice’ button where you can confirm that all the information on the invoice is accurate.
The approved invoice highlights all key components and makes them identifiable at first glance.
Each invoice also has a unique invoice number that is automatically generated at creation. This makes a world of difference to simplify documentation and track payment status.
Click Send!
Once you are satisfied with the draft, click ‘Send Invoice’ to send this billing request to the client. Your invoice is sent to your client’s inbox and you get copied in the email as a confirmation.
Send this invoice or choose to save as a draft for a later date.
Alternatively, you can save the invoice as a draft till when you decide to hit send.
Reminders
Your client gets an automatic reminder seven days before a payment is due after you send them an invoice and another when a payment is overdue. This replaces manual follow-up for overdue payments and helps you receive payment on time.
Conclusion
Invoices are a great way for billing clients and ensuring you receive payment for your services. It also gives your business a professional experience with automated reminders and easy tracking. With this, you spend your time more productively and build better relationships with your clients.